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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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Pictures: Richard Smith Photography Medea The Loft Theatre, Leamington Spa ***** Every time it treads the stage, the Loft Theatre delivers nothing but pure excellence. It is the place to go to for a quality of production that often matches the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford, and, one might assert, sometimes surpasses it. The Loft, vital and risk-taking, is - for me - easily the most talented, intelligent and daring amateur company in this southerly part of Warwickshire. To praise it would be understating. Why so? Its latest production, Euripides' Greek tragedy Medea translated (by Ben Power) into highly presentable English, ensuring staggering and shrewd loyalty to the original, all so beneficially well-articulated through all the cast's speaking, was staged brilliantly and inspiredly throughout by Craig Shelton, who besides directing Pinter, believe it or not played the impossibly stuck-up Mr. Toad in the Loft's Wind in the Willows. His close colleague in all this wondrous interpretation is Movement Director Dan Walsh. Shelton's take on, and acutely at all times well-conceived, scintillatingly devised and perspicacious Medea, was both as sagacious as it was masterly. Awesome and horrible (as it must be), shivering at every turn as the jilted princess lets slip her ghoulish intentions to her boys' aghast, horrified Nurse (though as loyal as Juliet's Nurse). Particularly because critical opinion has long held it (not least because of its theme of a female murderess who also butchers her own family) one of the hardest Greek plays to present: indeed, one of the hardest scripts cogently to present in all European literature (although Greek tragedy as a whole is riddled with killings). Perhaps the judges at the Great Dionysia festival in 431 BC behind the Acropolis concurred: revenge ('Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' - William Congreve); but infanticide was just not on.
How vastly this production was enhanced by an eye-arresting set devised by (newcomer?) Amy Carroll. It was used tantalisingly, and never, ever, falteringly or irrelevantly. The use of the square-on single stairway was the most significant, indeed dramatic, element, but especially for the title role. To see Medea haul herself up, two legs step by step, one leg at a time, or brazenly dominating the rest from the upper platform, or descending almost violently to set her plan in motion, or triumphing at her not just moral but actual, ineffable victory, was to witness staging (and acting) at its greatest height. The effect of such a simple device was paralysing, numbing. As for the not quite a dozen womanly Greek Chorus, cleverly contributing individually (of course in Athens' Theatre they were all played by men - compare our Jacobean era - and here as there one can only say scintillating and deeply touching. A huge bonus to every Greek drama - their lines, at time quite long - these observers, bystanders, witnesses are key to any play: supportive, puzzled, aggressive, torn, moralistic, so their comments count equally to the principals roles (who were, more than one source tells us, sometimes - and somehow!?- performed by just two actors. This Loft Company Medea - and this really was a company effort - was unimaginably superlative - remember, this is (nominally at least) an amateur ensemble - in all departments. Incredible, utterly believable acting (and superbly unearthing the true spirit of the 5th Century BC original - anger, pathos, revenge); and at every point appropriate an inventive lighting plan (the remarkably competent, perfectly timed Joel Hassall); the somehow timeless yet very apt, and certainly beneficial, costumes (the ever-inspired Helen Brady); and an exceptional sound plan full of rich, haunting, lulling moments (young Giles Allen-Bowden). Can theatre get better than this? But the Loft - and this stupendous Medea is a classic example - - habitually engages with bold, exciting repertoire, nowadays proposed, explored, selected and overseen by the Loft's experienced Artistic Director and leader Sue Moore (a formidable actor/actress herself), in conjunction with her close colleagues perhaps a large number of the Loft's admirable regulars -a phenomenally intelligent, literate and well-read, team. They know the worldwide possibilities - not just British but American repertory often, fresh from Broadway, achingly realistic and moving Irish drama, Russian, Scandinavian, Austro-German-Swiss acclaimed stageworks - and they prise from all these astonishingly fresh and original productions. They don't shrink from putting on Musicals (Sondheim, etc.) where it seems appropriate.
They will stage the musical version of Frank Wedekind's astoundingly ahead of its time play Spring Awakening (1890-91) about every kind of teenage Angst, especially sexual (remember this was the time of Freud and Havelock Ellis): suicide, gayness (love between schoolboys), masturbation and following guilt, rape (going too far - this was six decade’s before the relief of the contraceptive - illegal (backstreet) abortion, bungled so as to cause a teenage girl's consequent death, precisely because of grown ups' error; incarceration; Youth Detention Centre; threatened retribution; dire, appalling. Not just parental incompetence due to any threat to social status, but add to their futility fatuous Schoolmasters viciously parodied names, an assault on the pre-war German secondary educational (grammar school) system - think of the opening scene of Lewis Milestone's 1929 Great War and a mysterious adult figure, strange, mysterious, seemingly real, possibly imagined, like a kind of sympathetic Godfather dispensing truth, common sense, wise, supportive though admonitory advice, warning, but also forgiveness and desperately needed relief to Wedekind's main character or protagonist, Melchior Gabor. So for this past week, Medea. It's a story of revenge, closest in Shakespeare to Titus Andronicus (in the RSC 2025-6 plans); Coriolanus perhaps. Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; Sophocles' Elektra (where daughter and son finally slaughter their mother and her lover Aegisthus, who assassinated Clytemnaestra's husband and Elektra's father Agamemnon (Euripides wrote an Elekta too). The overdone version of Medea. by Roman Philosopher, Statesman and Playwright Seneca; or Pierre Corneille's 17th century Médée (Paris, 1635). Ditto last of Euripides' own plays, The Bacchae (mad king unwittingly slays -(tears apart -his own mother). Amazingly Medea was placed third (bottom) of the three plays (actually trilogies, or tetralogies) chosen and funded for performance in early Spring 431. Subsequent history has adjudged it very differently: "One of the great(est) plays of the Western canon". . Possibly the most celebrated, stimulating and memorable version was the stupendous French language Baroque opera, also entitled Médée (Paris, 1795) by the famed, popular Italian/French composer Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842), who was among Beethoven's French heroes and models (Méhul was another), around and after the 1789 Revolution. Curiously, despite a magnificent libretto (his eleventh) by François-Benoit Hoffman, exactly the same age as the composer, riveting choruses à la Euripides, an overawing (even savage) dramatic lead, and passages that even anticipate Wagner, inexplicably the opera Medea is very rarely heard, let alone staged, in Britain, or anywhere for that matter - though Prague right now, the ever-inventive Montpellier, one pioneering company in central Germany.
Even in Paris and other select venues it's given merely in (unstaged) concert performances. However Nicholas Payne, when Artistic Director of Opera North in Leeds - always a daring company - staged a monumental production starring (Dame) Joephine Barstow and conducted by ON's exceptional Music Director, Paul Daniel. Euripides' play was staged in 1973, with the supreme Greek actress Irene Papas, to wide acclaim. Papas did not play the role in the film: remarkably the director Pier Paolo Pasolini cast Maria Callas - an opera singer in a speaking part. Perhaps as memorable was the pairing in London (2001) of director Deborah Warner with the irresistible and merciless Fiona Shaw as the witch/goddess/princess/abandoned, forlorn/forsworn and ultimately vitriolic entity whom desperation drives to the unthinkable. Was Julie-Ann Randall's Medea up to Shaw's bloodthirsty, Lady Macbeth-type bitchiness? She was - no doubt about that. And she ranted - there's a lot of that, howling and bawling - even better. I've broadly praised further up all of Craig Shelton's essential departments, hailing their unmitigated pre-eminence - and, in this play, abetted by someone's uncredited mystical score, nothing less than transcendence. Now some further detail. Julie-Ann Randall in the title role, on whom not surprisingly the whole play centres, is in fact permanently onstage (except when she nips round to do a bit of bayonetting): the whole drama consists mainly of her engaging with either just one or other character, or as often with the Chorus) almost the whole time: an exhausting task, calling for - and successfully calling forth - incredible commitment, tenacity and savoir-faire, even in a play running (with no interval) for roughly just 90 minutes. But what a terrific, awe-inspiring solo performance, from the moment when - brilliant, in total darkness, her Medea howls, screeches - as if she has already perpetrated the crimes, or is perhaps anticipating it; realising the agony it (child-murder; an horrific manner of slaying her disturbingly young and innocent rival, Glauce (pronounced Glauke in Greek); and the inflicting of utter desolation upon her devious former partner - whom she has helped retrieve the famed Golden Fleece from across the Black Sea; and who has lined up a marriage to the daughter of the King of Corinth (Tom O'Connor): a pity Euripides allots him quite a minor scene or two (including quite an offstage, or rearstage, death): an upright, firm but unbossy character, a well-spoken ruler with distinct authority - the very opposite of the fatally obstinate and unrelentingly cruel Creon in Sophocles' third (though much earlier) Oedipus play, Antigone.
O'Connor' Creon was indeed formidable yet noble and regal, finely attired (interestingly all three 'kings' - Creon, Aegeus and Jason - were similarly attired (greys, whites, some red); an effect I thought was especially intelligent; although, Creon, like his namesake, is floored by disconsolate, heavy-hearted grief and faced with appalling tragedy proves his surprising vulnerability. Creon's very desirable daughter, princess Glauce (acted charmingly by - I think - a member of the Chorus, Anna Butcher), is visibly young, most likely teenage: no wonder the ocean voyager falls for her (Medea being virtually a matron by now). Meanwhile Peter Daly-Dickson's Jason - another unceasingly fine, varied performance - was presented as a captain- and commander- type, social climbing (by this marriage he will succeed Creon), strong, not desperately nice (that's what Euripides intended), well capable of betrayal (marital or otherwise), and mostly angry. True, senior (and brave) enough to have steered the ship Argo across the hazardous 'Euxine' (the Black Sea paradoxically called the favourable or hospitable ocean') to Colchis (modern Georgia). This saga of the "Argonauts'" heroic adventure is fascinatingly recorded (in the 3rd century BC or BCE) in a long poem by the Greek epic poet Apollonius of Rhodes. Shelton has given Jason a rather Tybalt-like feel: something out of West Side Story, perhaps. Harrison Horsley hovers around Jason, smoking the same half-cigarette unceasingly, looking ready to put the boot in wherever his master requires it; or perhaps just because he doesn't like someone himself. sinister: a Kiefer Sutherland, or Kevin Bacon, at their nastiest. Yet extraordinarily, Horsley turns, towards the end, into the two 'Messenger' scenes (a staple of Greek Tragedy, with a crucial function (witness Oedipus). And amid such a splay of fine performances, Horsley the juvenile stripling, the wafer-thin thug, emerged as one of the most lucid, articulate speakers of all. Great things await, perhaps. Jason's ditched the markedly older Medea (who had in fact killed her own brother to help him escape from Colchis) for an immensely desirable, beautiful, probably virginal young maiden; so is Jason cradle-snatching? Well, it certainly looks like it. But that - the derision incurred by her age - only sharpens Medea's determination for revenge. She has planned it before, and (as mentioned) reveals it in the very first scene. She is to be a death-dealer, and her total purpose is to avenge herself savagely upon the wholly indifferent man she once wished to - and does – love and with whom she had her two young sons. Only one in this version (the Greek clearly identifies two), but her close, if ironic, relationship with just the one here (Damien Varney, a befittingly moving, affectionate offspring, given the dread of his unexpected future) seemed quite sufficient.
Scenes later on show that, even though Medea bent on revenge has her fingers crossed behind her back, every warm word she utters to Jason bar a few lines - is a lie. He is lulled; rather gracelessly, although he thinks he is being graceful and generous, in offering her - to lessen her pain - exile; which she is indeed offered by the arrival, from Corinth's near neighbour (and economic/political rival) Athens of a sympathetic and understanding saviour, Aegeus (Mark Roberts) the father of Theseus. Mark Roberts is, in every one of his striking, finely-contrasted Loft roles, an impressive stage presence: here, his kindly mission - and he understands her desperate state as a jilted woman - does in fact save Medea - she escapes to Athens - even after her appalling dénouement (literally 'unravelling'): the quadruple murder, of her own and Jason's little son(s) - "the senseless murder of her innocent children"; and before them, of Creon's daughter, Jason's new Innamorato, by the appalling method of poisoning a scrumpious new golden robe (gold was the colour of the Sun God, her grandfather, which is why she Medea was often revered as a 'goddess'); and evilly, cynically despatching it by the boys' Nurse (Cheryl Laverick, always a valuable and telling contributor) as a 'wedding present' which will, when donned, literally devour the back, neck, upper and lower half of the body of whoever puts it on. Hence as horrific and agonising as, in those dark Oedipidean mythical days, any kind of inflicted death might be. Creon (his name denotes potentate or autocrat) , her loving but perhaps stupid royal begetter, whom we see with her rearstage at the bloodcurdling moment, himself expires from sheer grief. At the Loft the grisly, scene was ingeniously enacted, in a kind of alcove where you saw these dire events through a thin gauze, making a kind of double silhouette, followed by a frontal black curtain once the audience have witnessed the girl's burning horror. Again, finely acted by O'Connor and (especially) by Anna Butcher's dreadfully poisoned Glauce, Jason's intended spouse. The agony, for both, was unavoidable. Interestingly and appropriately, her name Mήδεια in Greek actually means 'cunning', 'plotter', 'schemer'. No wonder Medea is often in the ancient literature seen as a 'witch' or a 'madwoman' - something Randall's grim heroine sees as an accolade rather than calumny. Many women made it their job to know the properties of herbs, almost as much as Aristotle, who categorised them, or the pioneering Roman medic Galen did. So that alone did not constitute Medea a Macbeth-like hag. No, the meaning of - and the controversy and violent criticism surrounding Medea's tragic if brutal story in its day - was, and is, that the playwright Euripides went further than any of his known contemporaries . Alas, many 5th century tragic and comic poets' plays have been lost, not least due to an intense conflagration - caused during the Civil War, ring the Caesar-Pompey civil war - shattering the ancient world's greatest library, at Alexandria, 'the capital of knowledge and learning', a kind of ancient British Library or Bodleian. Thus very many even of Euripides' plays, and Sophocles' and Aeschylus's, as well as their many rivals', must simply have disappeared. The library housed nearly half a million manuscripts (as scrolls). Unbelievably, in Arab times books were burned to provide fuel for the city's baths. Is there any hope? It's possible that, as remains of ancient Alexandria have emerged from the Mediterranean, one day some Howard Carter (Tutankhamun) will rediscover bits of the library below the Saharan sands. Like all great revivals of the ancient plays we do have - the National Theatre's Oresteia, sundry efforts at Oedipus Rex, Trojan myths like The Trojan Women, Hecuba or Andromache (all Euripides), Ajax (Sophocles) comedies like Lysistrata, or the Roman Comedies of Plautus - there is always something new to find. And this is what Craig Shelton and his entire Loft team achieved: a fresh, original, brilliantly thought through, coherent, with the fear and tension, the loathing and the self-loathing, that feeling of something dreadful building, brick by brick, towards the multiple deaths in Corinth, and the bathos that matches the triumph as Medea reappears up top. The Loft's Medea was a stupendous achievement to set high among the previous achievements of Leamington's riverside theatre. The Leam may not be the Avon, but it certainly felt so this time. Roderic Dunnett 01-25 |
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